iOS 7, coming this fall

This looks nice. And as always, Apple talks a good game. Very good indeed, they have the gift of the golden gab.

I'm a little in doubt, though, apart from a fresher look color- and design-wise (and apart from the control center which I like), how big a difference will this really make in daily use? It seems to me that while the translucency and backgrounds moving behind icons when you turn the phone look great, it's mostly iCandy, as it were.

Will things actually be improved and fixed? Will there be text-to-speech for applications, like on Android? Will the nightmare of trying to select text be handled?

Also, when does it come to the iPad? You'll notice they only talk about the phone. Will it be like iOS4, where the system only came to the iPad months later?

New Nexus Seven

We've all passed a lot of water since the debut of Google's Nexus Seven, but when it came out (it feels much longer than just a year) it was almost revolutionary: a seven-inch Android tablet in good quality, with full features, and at a startlingly low price. And now it has been upgraded.

Me, I now prefer an iPad Mini, or a Kindle Paperwhite, or a Kindle Fire HD, for various reasons, including finding Android to be clumsy and buggy, but if one really wants a 7-inch Android tablet, I think the new Nexus is surely a good bet. It seems to have been upgraded and improved all over the range, included acquiring a back camera and the highest screen resolution in the class (full HD. My eyes can't follow once PPI gets above 200*, but if you want 323PPI, here it is).
I doubt one will find better for the money. (Though admittedly competition in this area is sharp a glass shards, so they are pretty much all good and cheap, overlooking the OS.)





*I'm using both my iPad 3 and my iPad 2, and I have to say that I don't notice the huge difference in screen resolution. Oh, I can see it if required to, but in practical use... And that's despite that anybody these days daring to release a tablet with only a 132PPI resolution would be laughed out of the market.

OneDollarScan

1DollarScan may be a solution where you have (or buy) a book or more that you don't need to keep (seems it's destroyed in the process), but would like to have as ebook.
The service comes in several levels, here is pricing info. The most basic scan for books is a dollar per 100 pages, which seems pretty cheap. OCR (real text), angle correction, and other quality options are extra.

I know that many people, myself included, find it genuinely difficult to read paperbooks after getting used to ebooks (some even get headaches). So if there are books you just must read, but nobody has digitized them yet, this might be a solution.
Getting your whole library, if you're a bookworm, scanned in good quality might cost a pretty penny though.

I asked them:

I suppose the customer always is the one to ship the book (if you don’t have it)?

The customer is ALWAYS the one to send in the book. Even if the book is a book that we have scanned before, we will still scan it. Every single book is scanned. When customers order from online bookstores, the physical book bypasses the user and goes directly to us. Sometimes this is good for users in other countries if they can find a seller in the U.S. then they save a lot on shipping and we deliver the file digitally into their account. So we have many users from other countries using this service. 

We typically deliver a PDF. We can do other formats, but it's usually a special operation to do that.

Are the scans real, searchable text?

If the customer adds OCR by request, then the scan is searchable. The quality of the OCR depends on a few things, like the quality of the book, language, fancy font, etc. (if they ask us to do angle correction on the file after or scan 
at 600 DPI it's a lot better).  But the average book is fairly accurate. 

The phone wars.

Funny.

Apple should lead the move to DRM-free ebooks

Apple should lead the move to DRM-free ebooks, article.
But above all, what should matter to Apple is that ending ebook DRM would be good for consumers. It would lead to true competition among ebook retailers, since any retailer could sell books that could be read on different devices, just as any bookstore can sell dead-tree books that anyone can read. We would be able to choose the device we want to use to read a new book. We wouldn’t have to worry about being able to access our digital libraries in the future.
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Viva la difference

[Thanks to Mashable]

Pointed, but I think there's something to it. It may be part of the reason why Android has trouble getting good apps, and selling them.

The Making of Apple's "Dual Mind" ad (1986)

PCWorld Exits Print, and the Era of Computer Magazines Ends

PCWorld Exits Print, and the Era of Computer Magazines Ends, article.
The news isn’t shocking. In fact, it’s sort of a shock it didn’t happen several years ago. After slightly more than thirty years in print, PCWorld magazine is ceasing publication, effective with the current issue, to focus on its website and digital editions.

PCWorld! Hot dang.

I've been noticing in recent years how magazine kiosks and book stores in town have been giving more and more space to candy and greeting cards (what's with the Brits and greeting cards?? They are everywhere), and less and less to magazines.

I guess in a few years, if you just can't stand using the web or a tablet, you'll just have to go without your magazines! And considering that for many people, magazines have been the only thing they read, something is going to give.

Cheap Kindle Fire now

If you want to save a bit of money on a Kindle Fire HD, now is the time. They are marked down now, and highly likely rumors have it that new models are coming in fall, with higher screen resolution. But unless they have other important upgraded features, I don't think that is essential. They are already nicely HD, and I think one has to be quite critical to notice any difference.
Buy in USA. --- Buy in UK.

I like the Fire HD more than I'd expected. Granted, it's sadly crippled as an Android device, but it's a good reader. And like I've mentioned, the text-to-speech feature is wonderful, I use it all the time, it's good to give my middle-aged eyes some rest from all the screens. It can read aloud to you from Kindle books, or from web articles in apps like Pocket (Read It Later). And the voice is a quantum leap better than previous ones.

Steve Jobs, funnyman

Siri's new voice.

iOS's Siri voice is new in iOS 7 (upcoming). Sounds good to me. I hope this forecasts a good text-to-speech function in iOS devices, hopefully easily available to app developers. My eyes seem to be stressed (start to itch/burn a couple times a day), perhaps from years of computer use, and I've come to love audiobooks, and the excellent text-to-speech in the Kindle Fire HD. (It was the only reason I bought the KFHD, but it has easily been worth it for me.)

Marvin reader app for iOS

Marvin, a new ereader app for iOS is very interesting.

See, here we have the typical problem. Marvin, of course, like other independent app, can't read books with DRM, meaning all the wonderful books I have bought from Kindle and Kobo can't be used with this wonderful app. What a waste, just because of paranoia!

Marvin lets you select between a gazillion different colors for text and background. I don't see who wants iridescent green on bright orange, but fortunately also has many variations of nice off-whites for the background and very dark blue or brown for the text, or vice versa. Things like this shames the Kindle and eBook apps, with their over-simplistic interfaces, apparently designed to not confuse three-year-olds. 

Besides this and many other nice options for layout, it also is the only reader I know of besides Kindle which can provide you with an Overview of a book and its characters. For better and for worse, this does not have to be made for a book, the app does it automatically.

It also has friendly relationships with Dropbox, Wikipedia, and other good things on the Net.

I'm almost surprised it does not have text-to-speech. The iPad's own voice is only connected to disability and therefore not great, and I only know a couple of apps for iOS with text-to-speech, and only one is an ereader app, and none of them are cause for any celebrations. I'd guess it's hard to make and expensive to acquire. But: they manage on Android, my Instapaper app InstaFetch has a wonderful text-to-speech capability. (And of course the reader on Kindle Fire HD is fantastic, I use it continually, in rare cases I even prefer it an actual audiobook!)

iPhone it is

OK, I've given up and gone back to my iPhone. Android's foibles just kept catching in my craw. Ugh.
A typical one: Apparently there is no way to turn off the HTC One! Normally when you hold down the sleep button, Off is an option. But no, the only one is restart. And nowhere in the limited settings HTC has on this thing did I find any way to turn it off.

In the past year or two, some Android and PC laptop makers have caught up with Apple in making beautiful hardware. It's probably harder to make usable software, so I'm not holding my breath.

Update: Thanks to Craniac:

I got it to work now, shutting it down. The difference was I hadn't unlocked the screen! (I'm not sure why you can reboot it, but not shut it down, without unlocking it.)

On other devices I have, it's very clear when the screen is locked, on the HTC One, it's just a small lock icon in the bottom row along with the other icons there.

About cheap subscriptions

I think there's a facet of the digital-publication revolution which few publishers have really realized yet: the power of cheap subscriptions.

Sure, everybody knows that cheaper brings more sales. But is it enough to make up for the lower price though? Well, the thing is in digital, the floor is the floor, since additional sales do not come with additional expenses in printing, distribution, etc.

There is a handful of subscriptions (photo mags, magazines for artists, money publications...) which I keep around despite the fact that I rarely have the time to read them. I do so because I just like them, I like having them if I ever feel like reading them, and because the price is low enough that it doesn't bother me.

Obviously that will vary from person to person and from time to time. For me at the moment, if a subscription is $20 per month, it better deliver and I better take advantage of it, otherwise it's ouddi. But if it's only $5 per month, I may just keep it around indefinitely.

I think this can be a gold mine for publishers.
A good way of doing it without feeling you're giving away the farm is to do it with bulk rebates. Say a monthly subscription is $20. Some will then make  the quarterly $50 or even $55. I say: make it $40, or even $35! And the yearly may be under $100, that's a big savings.  This will be a very attractive offer, and will make you a mint in loyal subscribers.

Office Arrives on iPhone — Too Little, Too Late?

Office Arrives on iPhone — Too Little, Too Late?, article.  And here.
Microsoft Office is finally available for iOS, but prepare for disappointment. It's only for the iPhone, and the app requires an Office 365 subscription, which starts at $60 a year. In addition to those limitations, the apps are bare bones, lacking many seemingly basic features: you can't undo actions or change fonts in Word, nor can you add slides or create new documents in PowerPoint.

I'm sorry, those limitations are so ridiculous that calling this "Office" (and charging 60 bucks a year for it) is indefensible. There are already apps which are much better, way cheaper, and run on iPad. (Office documents on a 4-inch phone, gimme a break.)